Stallman Unimpressed by Nokia Patent Pledge

Joe Barr writes "NewsForge is running a commentary by Richard Stallman on the recent PR blitz by Nokia concerning their promise not to enforce patent claims against the Linux kernel project. Stallman's take? "In effect, Nokia is lobbying the European Union to give Nokia and many others a new kind of weapon to shoot at software authors and users with--and telling the legislators, 'Don't worry, it's safe to let private armies carry these guns, because we promise that our gunmen won't shoot anyone in that building.'""

Comments

The Trivialization Of Physical Assaults

[rumblin'rabbit]

Often I see people equating non-physical "attacks" with actual violence, and it's complete B.S. In some universities, for example, aggressively criticizing someone's point of view is considered an actual attack on that person, creating "harm" and "pain" as real as a physical assault. They say it contributes a "hostile environment", and gives them an excuse to limit freedom of expression to what they find acceptable.

When someone sends you a letter telling you to cease-and-desist from infinging their patent, it's annoying and maybe expensive, but at the end of the day you go home to your family.

A bullet, on the other hand, can put your internal organs through a meat grinder.

See the difference?

A big problem with equating everything to physical assault is that it justifies responding to a legal or verbal attack with actual aggression since, after all, what's the difference?